Tarsus

To the Presbyters of Tarsus

for there is something harder still than this — that so great a city, so favourably situated as to join together by itself the Isaurians and Cilicians, the Cappadocians and the Syrians, should become an incidental casualty of the madness of one or two men, while you delay and deliberate and look to one another.

If, then, there were such a city that one ever heard people lamenting in it, and no one could go forth even for a little without this ill-omened sound, by Zeus, is there anyone who would gladly sojourn there?

But I say that this deed makes the city shameful and disgraces it publicly, and that those who sleep thus by day outrage their fatherland with the greatest insolence, and that they would justly be banished both from you and from everywhere.

But what will they call the city, in which everywhere well-nigh one sound prevails, and they make no time nor day nor place exempt, but in the alleys, in the houses, in the marketplaces, beside the theatre, in the gymnasium the thing holds sway?

Cyrus and his army remained here at Tarsus twenty days, for the soldiers refused to go any farther;

The inhabitants of this city had abandoned it and fled, with Syennesis, to a stronghold upon the mountains—all of them, at least, except the tavern-keepers;

And when the rest of Menon’s troops reached Tarsus, in their anger over the loss of their comrades they plundered thoroughly, not only the city, but also the palace that was in it.